The Toyota Gods Are Angry

We bought a new 2009 Toyota Sienna back in late April. It's a really cool vehicle (if you're into minivans, that is). I like it a lot.

I'm starting to wonder, however, if it was assembled on a sacred Native American burial ground or by an angry voodoo priestess in Louisiana. I'm pretty sure it is cursed.

It started on Father's Day weekend, when I was taking my dad to dinner and showing off our new van to him for the first time. I wrote about it in much more detail here, but in a nutshell, our brand new van--with all of 2200 miles on it--broke down on our way to the restaurant, and I had to have it towed to the dealership. Apparently at some point, we had run over something that crushed a coolant line, draining all of the antifreeze and overheating the engine. About $720 later (including the tow), we had the van back.

Two months later, in late August, I was driving down the road, minding my own business, when out of nowhere, a rock flew into the windshield. A $45 attempt to repair the windshield failed in less than two hours. The new windshield cost an additional $330.

The Mrs. took Olivia and June to her parents' house about a week ago, and while she was there, her dad noticed that we have damage to our rear bumper. It's puzzling damage, as neither the Mrs. or I have backed into anything, but the damage is rather low on the bumper. My best guess is that someone clipped it in a parking lot, but we have no idea when or where it happened, and whatever hit it had to have had a really low bumper. We still haven't quite figured out what could have done that sort of damage. The damage appeared to only be cosmetic, though, so with the holidays looming, I wasn't in any hurry to get it fixed. Besides, I figured, with the luck we've been having with this van, someone is bound to rear-end me during the first snowfall. Then someone else's insurance can pay for a new bumper.

But yesterday morning, the Mrs. reported that something was leaking from the back of the van, right by the rear tire on the side where the bumper was damaged. It was a reddish-brown liquid, and there was a considerable puddle of it. Why it took a week from the time that my father-in-law spotted the damage and who-knows-how-long from the time the van was hit to start leaking is another mystery. Chuck speculated that it was either brake fluid or transmission fluid. Having either of those leaking is not good, especially when the Sienna is the primary vehicle that we use to transport Olivia and June.

So rather than relying on someone to tag me on a slippery road this winter, I took it in to the dealership today. The fluid was from the heating system, and the total repairs for the line and the bumper repair will be $440.

For those of you scoring at home, that's a total of $1535 that we have put into this van in just over six months. I'm quite confident that we put nowhere NEAR that kind of money into our Dodge Grand Caravan that we had for seven years before buying the Sienna, and that includes the new set of tires we put on the Caravan.

The really, really frustrating part of all of this is that it's not Toyota's craftsmanship that is failing us. The wheels aren't falling off. The electronics aren't failing. There isn't a draft because the doors don't hang right. The stereo works.

We just can't seem to avoid road debris, flying rocks, and whatever the hell hit the back of our van.

It also seems to come in every-two-month spurts. We bought the van in April, had the first incident in June, had the broken windshield in August, and discovered the most current damage in early November.

If some SOB plows into the back of me in January and wipes out my $440 bumper, I'm going to be sooooooo pissed.

United Breaks Guitars

Having had a negative experience of my own with an airline (nowhere near as bad as this guy's, nor with United Airlines), I thought these two videos were absolutely hysterical. And I enjoyed the music, too! For the history of it, I'll quote directly off of the Sons of Maxwell's YouTube page:

In the spring of 2008, Sons of Maxwell were traveling to Nebraska for a one-week tour and my Taylor guitar was witnessed being thrown by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago. I discovered later that the $3500 guitar was severely damaged. They didnt deny the experience occurred but for nine months the various people I communicated with put the responsibility for dealing with the damage on everyone other than themselves and finally said they would do nothing to compensate me for my loss. So I promised the last person to finally say no to compensation (Ms. Irlweg) that I would write and produce three songs about my experience with United Airlines and make videos for each to be viewed online by anyone in the world. United: Song 1 is the first of those songs. United: Song 2 has been written and video production is underway. United: Song 3 is coming. I promise.

Thanks to my cousin in Arizona for bringing this to my attention! Enjoy the music.

Oh, and think twice before checking luggage on United Airlines. Especially if it's a guitar.

United Breaks Guitars

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

United Breaks Guitars Song 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-UoERHaSQg

Dave Carroll Music

http://www.davecarrollmusic.com/

,,Wut evar hapenned too speling and grammer,,

I am the son of a speech communication professor and an elementary school teacher, so I was well-versed in spelling, grammar, and punctuation growing up. I'm also something of a perfectionist. I tend to notice a lot of typos and misspellings that go unnoticed by many, although I'm not immune to making those kinds of mistakes myself. I can proofread a blog entry five or six times before I post it, and the tenth time I read it, I find a typo or a missing word or something. (Of course, this post will lead to open season being declared on every typo in here, I'm sure.) So while I often notice the little mistakes that are made in writing, they don't bother me all that much (except for my own typos, which drive me insane).

What bothers me--a lot--is the unbelievable inability by many people to even come close to grasping the written English language.

I am Facebook friends with a few local kids, most of them around middle school age. (No need to call the police. I know them and their parents through the neighborhood and local youth athletics, and the Mrs. is Facebook friends with them, too.) They're great kids, but most of them wouldn't know a punctuation mark if it slapped them in the face. It drives me absolutely NUTS to read some of their Facebook statuses. They string together three or four independent thoughts with absolutely no use of periods, commas, exclamation points, or question marks. Most of the time, I know what they're saying, but there are times I have to read a post out loud, slowly, and repeatedly, trying to figure out where one thought ends and another begins.

Then their friends get on there and respond to a status update, usually using equally horrible spelling and grammar with absolutely no use--or improper use--of punctuation. It's especially comical when one of them starts complaining about how school "suck's" and that they never learn anything there, and then several schoolmates add their own comments, all of them demonstrating how paying a bit more attention during Language Arts might be beneficial to them.

One Facebook status that had me in stitches was (and I'm not joking):

I just now finished my finall copy for language.

But they're just kids. Complaining about school is what you do when you're a kid, and Facebook is just informal communication (jeez, I HOPE these kids write better for school assignments!).

The failure to grasp the written language, however, extends well beyond kids. I was reading an article the other day about Syracuse wide receiver Mike Williams leaving the team--and possibly college--unexpectedly. Williams apparently initially posted this on his Facebook page:

I HATE COLLEGE I CANT SEE ME DOING THIS FOR LONG……..HINT HINT.-0 LMAO

Okay, he missed the period after "college" and didn't use an apostrophe in "cant," but overall, it's not bad.

Then he followed it up with:

Everyone Im staying in school to get my degree sorry for the faulse information every one getting.

I'm starting to think that maybe I don't want my kids going to Syracuse.

It's better than what UCLA "student-athletes" can cobble together, though. Here's the handiwork of a freshman wide receiver there named Randall Carroll, who posted this on his Twitter account:

oregon, stanford, and cal should have been easy wins ,, but shyt thys nigga norm chow dnt be trustin us ,, so it is what it is

Everything's going fine until the double commas. In between the double commas, however, is a bowl of alphabet soup that someone dropped on the floor. Maybe double commas are like those flashing orange lights you see in construction zones, warning that everything in between those lights is a disaster area. Same goes for everything in between double commas.

Then, in this article about Oklahoma State wide receiver Dez Bryant losing his last appeal to be reinstated after lying to the NCAA, there was this hilarious exchange of comments between readers "Mr Common Sense" and "Johnny":

89. Posted by Mr Common Sense Thu Oct 29 9:41am EDT
Now listen, you Oklahomo morons. Get off the NCAA and the BCS. The only real Big 12 team is Texas and Texas is also the only quality university in the BIg 12. While University Of Texas researchers work real science breakthroughs...etc, you morons from Oklohomo Universities can figure how to run your tractors on chicken pope.

Yes, I know that "Oklahomo" is spelled that way on purpose. I didn't realize that chickens had a Pope, though. A few more posts go by, and then Johnny comes up with this little slice of heaven:

93. Posted by Johnny Thu Oct 29 10:20am EDT
Mr como sense is really full of chicken s.hit "We will get University of Texas to..." Since when did you respresent UT to buy penny, again thinking small. And who is we.. You have no business brain, and don't know how business venture is setup, only people like you using brains between butt would think that. I'm glad that your comments show how stupid you are. Wow luckly in Oklahoma we don't have such a stupid people saying stupid things on behalf of their universities.

As a graduate of Texas A&M University, I found extra humor in supporters of rival Big 12 schools being incapable of forming coherent thoughts. I found the last two sentences of Johnny's post, in particular, to be especially side-splitting.

Okay, okay. Enough of picking on athletes and the people who comment on them. Surely members of Congress are better, right? Especially five-term senators, like Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley?

Maybe not.

Here's a beauty from his Twitter page back in June:

Pres Obama you got nerve while u sightseeing in Paris to tell us"time to deliver" on health care. We still on skedul/even workinWKEND.

Huh?

When did this happen? When did we, as a society, stop caring? When did sounding like a complete moron become acceptable?

More importantly, how do we fix this?